A wide variety of different sporting activities utilize a sports implement to enable a player to manipulate a playing article such as a ball. Tennis, golf, baseball, hockey, polo and billiards are all familiar examples. For beginners in any of these and other such sporting activities, the design and mechanical properties of a sports implement will typically have less influence on a player's success than inherent athletic abilities and work ethic. As players progress, however, the importance of equipment technology tends to increase in a manner that will be familiar to most. Golf is one sporting activity where player advancement often begins to plateau in the absence of improved and customized equipment, and advanced instruction.
Golf is a complex and demanding sport. There are many elements of play, but the most complex, demanding and perhaps most important element, is putting. The expectation of par golf is that half the strokes in a round are allocated to putts. In the world of sport, an apt place to apply the label of “sweet science” is the practice of putting a golf ball into a hole. Putting involves four components: a golfer, a ball, a green, and a putter. The green and the golfer are living things and therefore subject to imperfections and changes over time. The ball and putter are inanimate objects fixed by rules of the game. The challenge of putting pits the golfer against the green, and the margin of error may be breathtakingly small in terms of forces, angles and consistency and repeatability of player performance. It is imperative then, at least for serious players, that the putter be optimally suited to the golfer.
A putter is a simple machine called a lever. The putter, however, is not a simple lever, at least in the way it is employed by a golfer to strike a golf ball. By itself a putter is a class 1 lever. Application of a golfer to a putter, however, converts the putter into elements of both a class 2 and a class 3 lever. The golfer and putter may be understood as a single, complex lever, and multiple fulcrums and force applications need to be considered to understand the physics of the act of putting. While knowledge of physics is not necessary for able putting, it is a core element of putter engineering.
Those skilled in the art will be familiar with “changes” to a golfer, and even the greens, some virtually imperceptible, from day to day. The golfer may sleep wrong, eat too much breakfast, or have a flare-up of arthritis, for instance. Ask any golfer about his or her poorer than expected performance, and one may receive a credible, but often bizarre explanation rooted more in psychology or philosophy than science. With regard to the greens, they may be wet from dew, closely mowed, or vary in some other seemingly trivial manner such as having a different hue from different light conditions, in contrast to their condition on a previous day. It is well established that these and other seemingly subtle factors can affect the ability of a golfer to successfully putt a golf ball into the hole.
In the field of golf and other sporting activities of the type contemplated herein, athletes, equipment designers, coaches and others have proposed a great many different strategies over the years for customizing sports equipment to a player. It is believed, and at least mostly correctly, that fit, feel, and mechanical properties of a sports implement can allow players to adapt to varying conditions, or so develop their own performance that they become somewhat immunized from subtle, day to day variations. In other words, customized equipment is typically used to either enable a player to “solve” specific game problems, or to more generally influence and stabilize the way a player performs. One example of the former might be a specialized cue stick used by a billiards player for jump shots. An example of the latter might be a cue stick that is sized, weighted, contoured, or even colored to best suit the billiards player in general. Still another example might be a cue stick that can be changed in weight at the whim of the player.
Returning to the case of golf, it is believed by many that relatively minute adjustments in equipment can enable a golfer to optimally calibrate his or her performance. A golfer who is feeling different, psychologically or physically, than he or she did on a previous day, may attempt to adjust his golf clubs to improve his or her ability to successfully putt a ball into the hole. Trainers or golfers themselves also may attempt to customize equipment during practice sessions based on intuition and observations. For either case, known customizing systems have drawbacks.
Many conventional golf club designs focus on a parameter generally referred to as “swing weight.” Swing weight defines the balance point of the club, or the fulcrum around which the club balances horizontally without any external force applied. A change in the length, weight or distribution of weight in any component of a golf club such as a putter, or many other sports implements for that matter, can change the total weight and the swing weight, altering the function. One conventional customizing approach is to offer players a wide variety of different clubs, each purpose-built to have a different swing weight, and then allow a player to use the different clubs and determine which they prefer. The downsides to maintaining or obtaining such a broad club inventory are readily apparent. Other customizing techniques have attempted to provide individual clubs which may be adjusted to vary swing weight. These too have drawbacks, notably complexity, expense, and the undue amount of time typically required to make adjustments. Moreover, while such adjustments may be helpful, swing weight is not the whole story when it comes to customizing golf clubs, and is often overemphasized. Interchangeable grips, interchangeable club heads, and other customizable features are also known. It is really a player's deeply subjective impression of the “feel” of a sports implement, however, irrespective of actual mechanical properties, which likely determines how successful a player will be. Achieving a superior, or even simply satisfactory, subjective feel of a golf club is a difficult goal to achieve, particularly in view of the sort of day to day changes a golfer may experience, as noted above. In sum, previous attempts at customizable sports implements, and in particular adjustable golf clubs, have largely focused unduly on adjusting certain individual parameters, or failed to integrate adjustability of multiple different parameters into a simple, user friendly system that can be tailored to a golfer's present preferences or innate tendencies.